Ever since the National Commission on Excellence in Education released the 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform , there has been a growing awareness in the United States that our K-12 educational system is not performing well.

On todays standardized tests of basic knowledge and skills, American students compare poorly with those of other industrialized nationsand even some non-industrial onesranking close to last out of 21 countries. The average SAT score has fallen by more than 55 points since 1960. (...)

There is no single culprit for our educational weaknesses, but the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (...)have identified a primary cause: American teachers do not receive good preparation in the teacher training programs they take in college .

The reason for this is not hard to find. Education schools are not just weak or inadequate; they are based on fundamentally wrong premises. With rare exceptions, they assume that subject matter is much less important than method. Prospective teachers are taught how to teach rather than what to teach. Consequently, vast numbers of teachers are unqualified to teach the subjects to which they are assigned.

Moreover, there is a great deal of controversy over the soundness and efficacy of those teaching methods. Many college departments of education teach that it is more valuable for children to learn how to learn ...

For a very long time, the deterioration of social studies in U.S. schools resembled the decline of the Roman Empire: protracted, inexorable, and sad, but not something one could do much about.
Evidence kept accumulating that American kids were emerging from K-12 education and then, alas, from college with ridiculously little knowledge or understanding of their country's history, their planet's geography, their government's functioning, or the economy's essential workings.

"In the country that gave birth to Jeffersons conception of an educated citizenry, colleges and universities are failing to provide the kind of general education that is needed for graduates to be involved and educated citizens."

"...assessment after assessment and study after study shows that history is the core subject about which young Americans know least.The fraction of students (in grades 4, 8 and 12 alike) who reach the "proficient" level on tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is smaller in history than in any other field.... " Thomas B. Fordham Foundation - Effective Stat...

Education has emerged as one of the major issues in the 2000 presidential
campaign. Surely many educators are gratified to see so much attention
paid to their work, but there are dangers, too, as candidates
compete to offer expansive new programs that may appeal to voters.

This use of jargon implies that the teacher cares more about your
child's education than you do. After all, the teacher has been
trained to use the most progressive methods available, so his
or her knowledge on this subject shouldn't be questioned. What
the teacher neglects to tell you is that the "research" she refers
to is not necessarily supported by mainstream scientific inquiry
(i.e., published in scientific journals within a specific discipline
such as psychology).

By using terminology that has either negative- or positive-sounding
connotations, educators can succeed in silencing your opposition,
simply because you don't understand the meaning of the words and
phrases. Therefore, you should arrive at the teacher conference
knowing the language teachers speak, just as you would have to
do if you visited a foreign country.

The shopping mall high school has been criticized for its limited
capacity to enhance student cognitive skills. Two studies comparing
public and private schools find that students learn more in nonpublic
schools, in part because private schools concentrate student efforts
on academic pursuits. Yet the curriculum is only one of many differences
between public and nonpublic schools that could account for the
superior performance of private school graduates. And few, if
any, studies focused exclusively on public schools have convincingly
shown that the curriculum has much effect on student cognitive
skill.

We are not at this time quite prepared to recommend a return to
the medieval practice in which students tip professors according
to the quality of their lectures and seminars. But we are inclined
to endorse John Bishop's suggestion that college admissions be
determined by substantive external examinations for which students
can prepare by taking academic courses. Bishop found that Canadian
students acquired more cognitive skill, if they attended high
school in a province that required satisfactory performance on
an external examination. He interprets these results by suggesting
that students, when confronted by an external examination, have
a greater incentive to take more academic courses and to study
more assiduously. Our results are entirely consistent with his
findings and interpretation.

Our findings come from just one moderate sized Midwestern city. Since the education provided by River City schools seems to be considerably above the average, one cannot conclude from these results that students in all parts of the United States can enhance their cognitive skill simply by taking the more academic courses offered in their high school. Yet the findings should not for that reason be discounted.
The significance of the study is not that it tells us what is
happening across the United States. Instead, it tells us what
is possible and has, indeed, happened, within a public high school
system that serves a fairly diverse social population. If academic
course taking can enhance cognitive skill in River City, then
cognitive skill is not so immutable that it is beyond school influence.
The findings challenge all those who say not much can be done.
They challenge all those who say learning is genetically determined
or is decisively shaped by the student's family life. They challenge
those who think the most that can be done in American education
is to construct a shopping mall.

Les débats clés:

La lutte contre le pédagogisme aux Etats-Unis:

" Since the 1980's, there have been substantial efforts nation
wide to weaken mathematics education in America, and these efforts
have largely been successful.

This is not a communist conspiracy. It flows from an honest desire
to help the less fortunate. This effort is based on the misguided
notion thatweaker mathematics will be helpful to the traditionally
disadvantaged groups in our society. It is this effort, curiously
known as reform, that is the root cause of what has come to be
known as the math wars. (...)"

Sur le caractère réactionnaire des pédagogies "progressistes":

Romancing the Child, by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. "The romantic thinks nature has a holy plan. The classicist, the modernist, and the pragmatist do not. And neither does the scientist. In the end, the most pressing questions in the education wars are not just empirical, scientific questions, but also ethical ones regarding the unfortunate social consequences of the progressive faith, especially the perpetuation of the test-score gaps among racial and economic groups. "

When progressiveness leads to backwardness : Une belle argumentation face aux savants fous de l'Union européenne
qui veulent remplacer l'éducation par "l'acquisition de compétences":
Americas Achilles heel is its schools, I typed when I started
this article. Then I deleted the line. realized that the meaning
of the phrase Achilles heel is fading in the United States.
Too few Americans have heard of Achilles, or Troy, for the image
to be much but a snobby irrelevancy.
My struggle with the phrase tells a lot about what is wrong with
American schools. Every year, thousands of 18-year-olds who know
nothing about Achilles graduate from American grammar schools
and high schools. Neither can they figure percentages or write
a grammatical paragraph, let alone script Java. There is a school
of thought that says this dumbing down does not matter, that technology
and the marvelously flexible American economy will always compensate.
Why would a supermarket worker need to know how to type numbers,
when bar codes do the job? "

An Idea. . . that for the sake of academic excellence, greater fairness, and higher literacy, elementary and middle schools need a solid, specific, shared core curriculum in order to help children establish strong foundations of knowledge, grade by grade.

A School Reform Movement . . . taking shape in hundreds of schools where educators have committed themselves to teaching important skills and the Core Knowledge content they share within grade levels, across districts, and with other Core Knowledge schools across the country.

Dedicated to excellence and fairness in early education, the Core Knowledge Foundation is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organization founded in 1986 by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of many acclaimed books including Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them.